Hey John - I'm a mighty big fan of your work and your blog.Wondering if you saw this in today's paper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/movies/20looney.html

... I could use a good old fashioned John K rant. Unless you know that any of the animators involved are good, in which case I would love to get excited.

But if WB wants to make the world more aware of Looney Tunes, why bother remaking them? Why not just put it back in syndication? Let the work that made these characters famous speak for themselves? ... It all seems a little silly.

The animators involved in the new Looney Tunes are good. I suspect that's why John hasn't criticized it already.

Personally I don't think it has to be Bob Clampett's or Chuck Jones' quality. It just have to be decent and fun. Duck Dodgers series weren't brilliant or anything but they did little damage to the characters and provided some entertainment.

Mickey Mouseworks is not something I'm usually excited to watch but I watch the occasional episode once in a while and I think it's a decent show for kids. And it's also respectful with the characters.

Maybe if they managed to get the best team and they give them enough time to make theatrical shorts they could do something brilliant, but in a tv animated show it's pretty difficult to make something great in both animation and story. It only happened in Ren and Stimpy and it didn't last more than a couple of seasons.

I'm not sure how this new Looney Tunes show will turn out, but it doesn't look very bad, and it will easily be better than most of the things Warner has recently done with the characters.

On topic, I think that last prehistoric kid is a very appealing design.

And oh yeah, I also noticed that most of these character designs all have tall, human proportions. I wish Ed Benedict had never left Hanna-Barbera. Maybe HB cartoons would have still looked appealing for a longer period of time.

To me, Iwao Takamoto just never really understood about what made a design appealing. I was never that much of a fan of his work (his early stuff looked pretty decent, but overtime, it got very ugly. Scooby Doo looked terrible). Just my thoughts.

When did this happen? I suppose with the manga/anime crap and all the bling bling involved with a lot of flashes and explotions, having characters with almost no nose, empty faces, boring bodies... I don't know. I'm still shocked by the "appeal" of the 2012 Olympic mascots. I'm glad I had my childhood before this.

I guess you're assuming nobody searches for this type of post, right? To me this just feels way too recycled, but maybe new visitors will learn something from it. There is similarly informative and useful DEVOlution analysis here already, and after "If You Can't See It, It Doesn't Matter", this is kind of anticlimactic, but then this isn't a book. Am I being too selfish?

I have a strong feeling that Iwao Takamoto had a lot to do with this, both good and bad consequences. The last three drawings definitely look like his style.

This 1964 clip shows the danger ahead -- Ed Benedict-styled bears (one at one point looking like Ed's Butch design for the MGM CinemaScope Droopys) doing a production number before being greeted by an Iwao Takamoto human who could have fit in perfectly with any 'angry male authority figure' from H-B's 1970s TV stuff.

I wouldn't even call the top drawing 'ugly', it's just... nothing. Formless and featureless.

At least in stills the Globetrotters look as though they're trying to give them some life and movement, but then you watch an episode and realise the limited manpower and resources available in 1970, when this kind of 'realistic' character design was still relatively new at HB, were woefully inadequate to the task. There's more animation in the title sequence than you'll ever get in the following twenty minutes.

I think by far and away the best character design Iwao Takamoto ever did was Dick Dastardly. Everything that sums up the character is there in the sharp, angular shape of the face - the nose, the chin and the hard stare all point in the same direction, so coupled with his height, he's perpetually looking down his nose at everyone he talks to.